Lucky Girls: Stories

By Nell Freudenberger

First highlighted in The New Yorker fiction issue, here is award-winning writer Nell Freudenberger’s debut story collection

Lucky Girls is a collection of five novella-like stories, which take place mostly in Asia. The characters—expatriates, often by accident—are attracted to the places they find themselves in a romantic way, or repelled by a landscape where every object seems strange. For them, falling in love can be inseparable from the place where it happens.

Living according to unfamiliar rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unique ways. In the title story, a young woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death. The protagonist of “Outside the Eastern Gate” returns to her childhood home in Delhi, to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother, who left her family for a wild journey over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. In “Letter from the Last Bastion,” a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a novelist who’s built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and who, in his letters, confides in her a secret about his past.

Highly anticipated in the literary community and beyond, Lucky Girls marks the debut of a very special talent that places her among today’s most gifted young writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061873386

Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Book preview

Lucky Girls

I had often imagined meeting Mrs. Chawla, Arun’s mother. It would be in a restaurant, and I would be wearing a sophisticated blue suit that my mother had sent me soon after I moved to India, and Mrs. Chawla would not be able to keep herself from admiring it. Of course, in those fantasies Arun was always with me.

As it happened, Mrs. Chawla appeared early one morning, in a car with a driver, unannounced. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my painting shorts, having a cup of tea. There was no time to straighten up the living room or take a shower. I went into the bedroom, where Arun and I had often slept, and put on a dress—wrinkled, but at least it was clean. I put my cup in the sink and set a pot of water on the stove. Then I watched through the window. Mrs. Chawla had got out of the car and was standing with her arms crossed, instructing her driver how to park. The car moved forward, backed up, and then inched forward again.

Mrs. Chawla shaded her eyes to look at the backyard: the laundry line with my clothes hanging on it, the grackles perched on the telephone pole, the pile of soft, rotting bricks. I had a feeling that had come to seem familiar in the eight months since Arun had died, a kind of panic that made me want to stand very still.

The bell rang.

Hello, Mrs. Chawla, I said. I’m glad you came. From her handwriting, I had expected someone more imposing. She was several inches shorter than I was, and heavy. Her hair was long and dyed black, with a dramatic white streak in the front; and she was wearing a navy blue salwar-kameez, the trousers of which were tapered at the ankles, in a style that was just becoming fashionable.

Yes, she said. I’ve been meaning to. I can’t stay long. She gave me a funny smile, as if I weren’t what she had expected, either.

Will you have some tea? I offered.

Do you have tea? she asked, sounding surprised. She looked at the drawn blinds in the living room. There was a crumpled napkin next to the salt and pepper shakers on the table, where I had eaten dinner the night before, and which I had asked Puja, the servant, to clean. Now that it was summer, cockroaches had started coming out of the walls.

Please don’t go to any trouble, she said. Puja can do it—is she in the kitchen? Arun had hired Puja to do my cooking and cleaning; when he told me she had worked for his mother, I’d hoped that Mrs. Chawla was making a friendly gesture. In fact, Puja was a terrible housekeeper and a severely limited cook. She lived in a room at the back of the house, with her husband and four little girls; at night I often saw her crouched in the backyard, making chapatis on a pump stove with a low blue flame.

Mrs. Chawla walked confidently toward the kitchen, calling Puja in a proprietary voice, and I realized that Arun’s mother had been in my house before. She could have come any number of times, in the afternoons, when I taught art at the primary school or went out shopping in Khan Market. Puja would have let her in without hesitation.

When Mrs. Chawla reappeared, she scrutinized the chairs, before choosing to sit on the sofa. She smiled, revealing a narrow space between her teeth. Where exactly are you from? she asked.

My father lives in Boston, but my mother is in California now, I told her.

Ah, said Mrs. Chawla softly, as if that explained everything. An American family. That must make it difficult to decide where to return to.

I had no plans to return, as I should have explained. It rules out Boston and California, I said instead.

Mrs. Chawla didn’t smile.

My brother, I added, was getting married in Boston in July.

And you like the bride? she asked.

Oh, I said. I only met her once. I could feel the next question coming, and then a thing happened that often happens to me with people who make me nervous.

What’s her name? Mrs. Chawla asked.

Her name, which I knew perfectly well, slipped into some temporarily unrecoverable place. Actually, I don’t remember, I said.

Mrs. Chawla looked at me, puzzled. How strange, she said.

Puja brought the tea. She knelt on the floor and began placing things, item by item, on the coffee table: spoons, cups, saucers, milk, sugar, and a small plate of Indian sweets that Mrs. Chawla must have brought with her. The tea, it seemed, was no longer my hospitable gesture.

How is she doing? Mrs. Chawla asked, nodding at Puja.

She’s wonderful, I lied. Now that Arun wasn’t here to tell her what to do, the house was getting dirtier and dirtier.

Puja’s little girls were watching us from the kitchen doorway. When Mrs. Chawla saw them, she said suddenly, Girls, and repeated it sharply in Hindi. I have told her that if she has another baby—Mrs. Chawla paused and looked at Puja—"Bas! Enough, I’m sending her back to Orissa. She turned back to me. That’s east India, she informed me, as if I had never seen a map of the subcontinent. The people there are tribals. Did you know that? Puja is a tribal. These people have nothing, you know, except floods and cyclones. Now they’re having terrible floods—have you seen them on television? Thousands of people are sick, and there isn’t enough drinking water. I tell her that, and what do you think she says?"

Puja knew only a few words of English. She seemed to be smiling at her feet, which were bare, extremely small, and decorated with silver toe rings.

She says she needs another child because she wants to have a boy, Mrs. Chawla said. Stupid girl. Puja giggled. Stupid, evidently, was one of the English words she did know. Then Mrs. Chawla said something else, in Hindi, and Puja stopped giggling and left the room.

Did you understand? Mrs. Chawla asked me.

A little, I said. You said she was a woman with girls?

Very good, said Mrs. Chawla. I said she was the kind of unfortunate woman who has only girls.

Oh, I said.

Mrs. Chawla eyed me craftily. You think I’m cruel to them.

No, I said. I was used to this kind of frankness from Indian women of Mrs. Chawla’s age and station, and I liked it.

Mrs. Chawla looked as though she were going to say something else, but just then the electricity went out.

I’m sorry, I said. It usually comes on again in a second.

This is a good area, a government area, she said approvingly. Did you know that?

I had been living on Pandara Road for almost five years, a fact that Mrs. Chawla knew, so I didn’t say anything. The lights came on about halfway, low and flickering, and the fans spun just enough to move the air. Often this happened at night, when I was sitting in the living room, pretending to read.

Mrs. Chawla put her hand on my arm. The point is—what’s wrong with girls?

Nothing, I said.

Then…good, Mrs. Chawla said. You can help me teach her. She leaned back, and the cheap wicker sofa creaked. I had bought it because Arun thought wicker was cool. I didn’t know why a sofa needed to be cool, and now cockroaches were living in the little wicker spaces. I said a short, fervent prayer that Mrs. Chawla wouldn’t see a cockroach. Puja started to pour the milk in my tea, but Mrs. Chawla stopped her. Let the lady do it herself, she said, in English, and then turned to me. She’s never seen a woman like you, living so well on her own.

When I met Arun, I was wearing borrowed clothes. It was my first time in India and I was visiting Gita Banerjee, the most glamorous friend I had made in college. My parents had bought the ticket for me—To see the world, my father had written on a card, before you come home and settle down. I was twenty-two.

A few nights after I arrived in Delhi, the Banerjees had a party. Gita’s father had once been some kind of ambassador, and the entire extended family seemed constantly to be entertaining important visitors in their extravagant houses. Gita’s younger sisters thought it would be fun for me to wear Indian clothes, and they spent a long time dressing me up in a dark pink sari with a matching blouse underneath. I was wearing glass bracelets, and my hair was braided like theirs—they even painted my hands with mendhi, which left intricate brown patterns across my palms. We spent so much time making me look like them that no one had a chance to teach me to walk in the sari, which turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined, like finding yourself in the street wearing only a bath towel.

After a while, I left the party. I had meant to go back upstairs to my room, but I opened the wrong door by mistake and there was a man sitting on a bed, in the light of a small reading lamp. He had taken off his jacket, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up.

I’m sorry, I said, and started to back out of the room.

Hello, he said. Are you hiding, too?

I laughed.

You’re Gita’s friend, the college graduate, Arun said.

I was Gita’s roommate, I said. Do you know Gita?

Since she was born. He stood up and shook my hand. Uncle Arun, he said. There was a bottle of imported whiskey on the table, and he asked me if I wanted a drink.

I did, but I wondered if that would be inappropriate. I had noticed that although there was wine downstairs at the party (which Gita and I had liberally sampled), most of the women weren’t drinking. Is that OK? I asked. I mean, in India?

This was the first time Arun really looked at me. His eyes were green, like a Kashmiri’s. I think it’s up to you, he said. Even in India.

Arun was twenty-three years older than Gita and me. He was tall, with broader shoulders than most Indian men I had met, and he had a trimmed black beard with some gray in it. I couldn’t help staring at his hands as he poured my drink—the long, thin muscles of his fingers, and a raised white scar, straight as an incision, across the top of his left wrist.

He asked if I was enjoying my visit. I admitted that I hadn’t been out much, but that I liked the parts of Delhi I had seen.

Arun smiled. You want to go to Agra, of course.

Not just Agra. I wanted to sound as if I knew more about India than that.

Do you know what the Taj Mahal looks like? Arun asked.

Of course.

He leaned forward. Did you know that the emperor meant to build another one across the river?

I nodded, although I hadn’t even known that there was a river. I had always pictured it in the desert, surrounded by raked yellow sand. He built it for his wife, right?

Mumtaz, said Arun. But what you see is only half his plan. There was going to be another one for him, exactly the same but in black marble.

I thought he was teasing me. I don’t believe you, I said.

But when he died they simply buried him next to her—his grave is the only thing that isn’t perfectly symmetrical. Arun smiled slightly. He had a vision. They ruined it.

We were quiet for a minute.

Can I ask you something? he said.

I wondered stupidly if he was going to kiss me. I had never kissed a man with a beard.

Why did you come to India?

I wanted to see where Gita was from.

Arun sipped his whiskey, as if he were waiting for more. So if she’d been from Paris you might have gone there instead?

But I’ve been to Paris.

Arun laughed. You’re just like these diplomats’ children, he said. World-weary at twenty.

Oh, yes, I said, indicating my clothes. Very cosmopolitan.

I wasn’t going to ask.

You don’t like them. I pouted. I was already a little drunk.

They’re nice clothes, he said. I just don’t like Western girls in Indian clothes, but I’m perhaps behind the times.

Why?

Arun paused. Because clothes mean something here. Historically. And when you wear them it’s for romance, glamour—you don’t mean anything.

I stared at the patterns on my hands. Suddenly, it seemed as if Gita’s sisters had played a practical joke on me, like dressing up a cat or a dog.

I’ve offended you, Arun said sadly.

No, you haven’t.

I’m always offending women. I don’t know how to behave around them.

Making fun of their clothes isn’t the best strategy, I told him.

Arun smiled. Have another drink. Prove we’re still friends.

I think I’m extremely drunk already, I said.

Arun seemed to consider this. You’re extremely pretty, he said. Even in Indian clothes. And since we don’t want anything to happen to you, maybe I should take you back down to the party.

To this day, I remember that as the most thrilling thing anyone has ever said to me.

I am not extremely pretty, a fact that Mrs. Chawla noticed right away. The second time she visited, I was sitting in my studio, in front of a canvas, staring out the window at Puja’s children, who were playing hide-and-seek, running in and out between the rows of hanging laundry. The studio was a prefabricated one-room structure, which I used because the rooms in the house were too dark. There was a single bed where I used to sleep if I was working late. Now I slept here all the time.

Mrs. Chawla must have rung the doorbell and, not finding anyone, walked around to the back. Or maybe she was accustomed to coming in through the garden. I looked up and there she was, directly in front of me, peering in the window. It took me a few seconds to realize that she couldn’t see through the screen at this time of day. I was wearing my painting shorts again.

Just a minute, I called, and then changed my mind. I had no reason to pretend.

Mrs. Chawla was dressed in moss green, and her hair was braided down her back like a girl’s. She looked at the paints spread out on the table, at the straw mats on the floor, and the bed with a mosquito net, a foreigner’s thing. Then she looked up at the fan, which was dusty, with a black layer of grease on one side of the blades. She sighed and sat down at my table. You’re not sleeping here, are you?

Sometimes. I like it out here.

Mrs. Chawla looked shocked. But he never slept here?

Mrs. Chawla… I began. I could hear the milkman calling from his bicycle.

I mean, I could see why you would want to sleep here now, if the two of you used to—if that was the bed where you slept, as it were.

It’s not really any of your business, I said.

Mrs. Chawla ignored me. What I do not understand—she paused, as if we were thinking aloud together, collaborating on a difficult puzzle—is how he could stand to stay somewhere so dirty. He was always so particular, and his house—the house where he lived, I mean—was immaculate.

Leave if it bothers you, I said.

Ah! said Mrs. Chawla. I see what he meant. You’re not beautiful, but you’re strong-willed. That’s appealing for a man like Arun, who always got exactly what he wanted. She lowered her voice, as if she were telling me a secret. I used to think we might have spoiled him.

Yes. If he hadn’t had all of these people coddling him, he might have learned how to make a decision, I said, surprising myself.

Mrs. Chawla put her palms in the air and shrugged theatrically. But would any of us have been happy with his decisions? Do you think you would have been? She smiled. It’s a Catch-22 situation. She stood up. This afternoon I have to go see Laxmi and the boys. She’s upset, you know, that I am visiting you.

I pretended to start painting.

She doesn’t understand why you’re still here, Mrs. Chawla told me. I’m sure she’ll ask me.

I wondered if finding the answer to this question—why I was still here—was the purpose of Mrs. Chawla’s visit.

Maybe she should come ask me herself. I hadn’t meant to say it, only think it, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t expect to see Mrs. Chawla again.

She gave a short, barking laugh. You seem quiet, she said. But you’re sharp.

After Mrs. Chawla was gone, I realized that I had wanted her to look at the painting, which was the view out my window, with the laundry and the drying okra plants against the main house. It wasn’t especially good—I was going to scrape it away and use the canvas again—but I didn’t think Mrs. Chawla would have known that. She would have seen the perspective and the colors, and the way I had reproduced the backyard of her son’s second home, and she would have known that I wasn’t a phony. At the same time, it annoyed me that I should care what she thought.

That first trip to India had been at the invitation of Gita’s family, the Banerjees, and they went out of their way to insure that I saw nothing I would not see in New York. We went to a restaurant in Defence Colony, the elite shopping enclave, and to the Lodi Gardens, where women in salwar-kameez and running shoes promenaded briskly down designated exercise paths. Gita had compared it to Central Park, but Central Park didn’t have ancient stone architecture. Great ruined domes, purple in the last bit of light, appeared to float above the wet grass. When I asked what period the ruins dated from, Mrs. Banerjee laughed and said that she had no idea.

The only real tourist attraction I saw, on an overplanned excursion in the care of the Banerjees’ driver, was an old Mughal fort, the Purana Qila, one chipped blue tile of which Gita forced me to take when we found it lying on the grass. No one else wants it, she said, picking it up and secreting it in her jacket. I protested but was privately pleased—it might be my only souvenir. Then, one morning, Arun showed up for breakfast and announced that he was taking Gita and me on an overnight trip to Agra, to see the Taj Mahal.

As soon as we were on the train, Gita took over her mother’s role, commandeering an extra seat from an old man in a Nehru jacket and then, hours before we were hungry, spreading out an elaborate lunch that the Banerjees’ cook had prepared. The first-class cars were air-conditioned to a luxurious, wintry temperature, and my arms, in the thin blouse I had chosen, were covered with goose bumps. But when Arun said that we should sit between the cars, where the men went to smoke and where you could see the green country streaming past, Gita looked at him as if he had suggested that we paint our faces and sing in the aisle for change.

Arun is constitutionally a bachelor, she told me after he left the compartment.

I thought he was married. I still don’t remember how I knew this; I may have just assumed it.

Oh, he’s married now, but he waited forever. Gita looked at me. Living that long by yourself, you develop habits. I knew she wasn’t talking about smoking on trains, but I didn’t particularly feel like being warned.

Gita and Arun agreed that I had to see the monument for the first time at sunrise, from the gate, and so we spent our first day in Agra trying not to see the Taj Mahal. It wasn’t easy. The parapets of the Agra Fort opened, in an orderly progression of cusped arches, onto view after view of the tomb. There was little else besides the monument: men beating clothes on the riverbank, water buffalo in the mud, the river itself, skittering into the flat, tan distance and sending silver flashes into the smog like a child playing with a mirror.

Don’t look, Arun said, coming up behind me. Careful, he gasped, as we passed the arrow slots along the steep red stairs.

That night, we ate in a restaurant Arun knew, avoiding the rooftop tourist cafés, strung with colored lights, that all boasted a Taj view. It was the middle of the summer, and the number of tourists was relatively low. Arun had suggested that we stay in one of the cheap hotels near the monument instead of the colonial palace near the airport where Gita’s mother had reserved rooms: This way, we can stumble out of bed and be standing in front of the Taj.

Because of our sunrise engagement, Gita and I went to bed at ten. I had expected that we would stay up talking, but after a few minutes I could hear her quiet breathing. The room had an air cooler, which made a fierce grating sound and did nothing else. I tried to lie absolutely still, but I was already sweating when the power went out. The fan clicked to a slow halt, and the rectangles of light from outside, my only orientation, disappeared in a dark so heavy that it was like a soft cloth in my mouth.

After a few minutes, my eyes had still not adjusted to the dark, and I was now sweating uncontrollably.

Reviews for Lucky Girls

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book!

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Orphan"This is the short story of a family splintering in different directions. The parents are separated and on the verge of getting a divorce. The nearly adult children are in Thailand and Bangor, Maine - worlds apart from one another. When the family converges in Bangkok it is an orphan that shifts the tide for them all, individually and as a family.I can't decide if I like Alice or not. As a mother, what should she have done when her kid calls up and says not only has she been assaulted, but raped as well? That's not the sort of thing you let drop when the kid suddenly changes her story and says it's no big deal.Lines I liked, "She drops the dog, possibly robbing him mother of his life" (p 31) and "...often, when you step around the conventional way of doing things, you end up with something worse" (p 56)."Outside the Eastern Gates"The protagonist in "Outside the Eastern Gate" is like any 40 year old person facing the deteriorating aging of a parent. There is a sense of bafflement at the role reversal; a sense of sadness about being away for so long. Upon returning to Delhi she remembers the desperate longing for her mother's love while simultaneously coping with her father's Alzheimer diagnosis.A line to like, "The bogeyman appears in the first forty seconds after nightfall" (p 68). Good to know.

[akagracie · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A New York Times Notable Book; Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award. I wanted to like this book, and in fact I identified with a great deal of it. I understood the differentness of living. . . being identified. . .trying to lose my identity. . .as an American in another country. One story, The Tutor, spoke so clearly to me I cried at the end, filled with admiration. However, the last story, The Last Bastion, was so painful that I couldn't finish it. My problem, I readily admit. I think you should read this. I cannot.